An exploration of enlightened absurdity that loses much of its appeal in the overinclusion of details.
A trio of sages explore absurdity and chase enlightenment in this Buddhist-themed picaresque from Goldstein.
Feng Kan, the first sage presented in Goldstein’s debut novel, begins his life slow-witted and without prospects for a wife or livelihood. A monk takes pity on the boy and offers to train him in the ways of monastic life. Struggling at first, Feng Kan eventually excels, performing very mundane tasks and eventually becoming the master of the monastery’s granary. After his struggles, Feng Kan finds enlightenment and goes on to train two pupils, Shih Te, the foundling of the book’s title, and Han Shan. The first half of the book concerns this trio’s mystical encounters—discoursing with demons, taming wild tigers and teaching Buddhist sutras—as well as the dialogues shared among the monks. The conversations are riddled with absurdities, the kind of intentionally illogical banter that later—in Japan—will find expression in the koans of Zen Buddhism. Unfortunately, the charm of these interactions is diminished significantly by the book’s wordy prose and the numerous digressions that explain esoteric Chinese healing practices, the structure of the human mind in Ch’an orthodoxy and the proper way to teach a wild tiger to be peaceful. All of these explanations strive for consistency with Ch’an precepts, but Goldstein misses the mark, smothering the freedom of Ch’an absurdity and apparent silliness with an overeager zeal for detail. The second half of the book contains translations of Han Shan’s poems, or those attributed to him, and these work more effectively than the earlier prose. The translator has a tin ear, but the translations are clear and sincere. More than 200 brush paintings are also included in the text, and they add vibrancy to the poems.
An exploration of enlightened absurdity that loses much of its appeal in the overinclusion of details.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2010
ISBN: 978-1426914683
Page Count: 700
Publisher: Trafford
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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